Our Schools Have Been Hijacked: Let’s Talk About It

What would it take to provide a “world class” education? Is it possible in the U.S. public schools system as it is? I venture to say no.

If the answer is ‘no’, then what needs to be done? Is the answer in democratizing our schools? Eliminating bureaucracy? Liberating the education system from corporate control? Putting decision making power in the hands of educators?

How could some of these things be accomplished? Are they feasible goals? Would it be possible to create an alternative?

Could educators create a sustainable alternative to the education system we have today? Could we have grassroots schools that taught children what they needed to know?

We don’t want or need more charter schools. We don’t want corporate fingers dictating the every move of educators.

We want, I believe, to provide an equitable education that creates the possibility for an open society or democracy in the future. We want an educated citizenry.

We need that if we are not to fall into the clutches of some not so distant corporate totalitarian regime.

Our public schools have been hijacked. It is becoming increasingly impossible to provide the education we know should be provided.

What can we do? How can we take back our system or create an feasible alternative? Do we need to teach outside of school?

Discussion

8 thoughts on “Our Schools Have Been Hijacked: Let’s Talk About It”

These are all great questions. I feel like have tried to have many of these conversations here at the cooperative, and I do hope more educators bring these types of questions into their classrooms and their teacher’s lounges, and their union meetings. I think we as teachers need to stop reacting so often to what is being done to us and starting driving the conversation, creating the solutions and promoting it to other teachers, parents and students. What is being now is exhausting and draining, and not moving us in any closer to a positive future. I think it is time for a wide scale collective visioning session, starting locally and growing much like the Occupy movement.

I go back and forth on the solution. I see so many viable options – from homeschool to unschool to small neighborhood schools to charter schools and public schools that honor the voice of students. I think on some level, I dream of creating something different either within my district or within my own neighborhood.

Friendly neighborhood reminder not to paint all charter schools with the same brush; rather, please support others in creating learning spaces in which you believe, regardless of what they’re called or where they’re located.

I agree. Charters have worked in certain places with varying levels of success. However, schools, charter or public, being removed from communities have functioned as a sort of forced diaspora. Where schools were once a large part of a community, they have become alien building with little connection to the communities where they are housed. This is not to say that some schools, charter or not, serve the immediate community, but kids being bussed to distant places eliminates the possibility for a community and a school to truly work together. The problems of education are tied to community and societal problems. Our institutions have been separated for years; nothing functions in concert. We have to move in that direction for problems to be solved.

One of the sadly rich ironies of public education at present is how willing we are to uproot kids and to move them to completely alien school communities while we refuse, systemically, to look at the work of school system’s like Finland’s because what works there “would never work here.” Don’t change how kids are taught; just change where: a sorry state of state-run affairs.